That’s a lot of valuable land liquidated for pass through convenience.

An interesting hypothetical would be adding up value of the lots, speculating on demographic trends, no street car removal, etc., what the revenue was (could have been) that the city lost by the inner city freeway scars.

All it is, is a glorified on and off ramp for the freeway. I think the firm hired over engineered it for the money they got from the job. Just get rid of all of it, re-striping is not enough. Plus the city would get more taxable land returning it to parcels that are then able to be developed.

Also I think its an embarrassment how we treat The Walker there. We got ‘star-chitects’ to design the new museum, and we have it next to freeway grade giant signs, an ugly huge roadway, complete with cobra street lamps. Way to go DOT, destroying calm environments and keeping the pedestrian down seems to be what they are good at.

Not to mention the empire-building Walker’s own insensitive treatment of their environment by successfully pushing the demolition of the Rapson-Guthrie designed theater. (And the insensitivity of the like-minded Guthrie board who earlier put that glass canopy on the theater.)

Speaking of wanting to avert your eyes, only the “new” Walker perfectly compliments the freeways running through what used to be an appealing part of Minneapolis. Ugly found ugly on match.com for buildings and roads.

I appreciate this visionary discussion of making these points in the urban core more for people again. I am troubled by a missing element though. Transit right of way. The bottleneck is one of the most important transit corridors in the whole state. Let’s talk about how some of the space liberated from I-94 access / egress ramps can be re-used for an elevated transit-way to avoid congestion in the bottle neck and with appropriate station locations, convert thousands of trips in the area to transit! Bikes can’t do it all. Think truly big picture, please.